Personal Canon

Distinguished art historians select two favorite artworks — one famous, one obscure — and talk about what they mean to them.

How Art Stirs the Subconscious

Caillebotte, Gustave. Paris Street; Rainy Day. 1877, Art Institute of Chicago

“Besides being social people… we are all also private. The way a tree grows and orients itself to the light, the way an animal is hungry, or thirsty, or scared, or happy. We have all those features ourselves, as the kind of creatures we are. And art, even when it’s very cerebral and very learned, touches on aspects of ourselves that are not fully under our control.”

— Professor Andrei Pop

Contributing Professors

Andrei Pop

Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Art History, and the College, Department Chair, Modern Art and Aesthetics
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Professor Pop is interested in narrative art, the relation between thinking and imaging, and between subjectivity and reality in art of the modern period. He is particularly interested in the aesthetics of ugliness and symbol-making.
Bio
Joseph Koerner

Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, Department Chair
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Joseph Koerner teaches the history of art and architecture from the late Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on Northern Renaissance art, as well as on Dutch seventeenth-century, European Romanticism, and German and Austrian Modernism.
Bio
Niall Atkinson

Associate Professor of Art History, Romance Languages and Literature, and the College
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Professor Atkinson’s research focuses on public space, urban history, soundscapes, geography and travel as well as the architecture and urbanism of late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and explores the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of pre-modern urban societies.
Bio
Meredith Cohen

Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture & Director of Graduate Studies
UCLA
Professor Cohen teaches the art and architecture of medieval Western Europe. Her research focuses on the production, use, and reception of architecture and urban spaces, as well as cultural heritage and historiography related to medieval architecture, particularly the Gothic in France.
Bio
Mitchell Merback

William Arnell and Everett Land Professor & Chair [of the History of Art]
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Professor Merback specializes in late medieval and northern Renaissance art. His two primary scholarly focuses are the roles art objects and visual culture can play in the formation of historical subjects, and the phenomenologies of the Christian devotional image.
Bio
Bronwen Wilson

Professor, Renaissance and Early Modern Art, Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art, and the Director of the Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies
UCLA
Professor Wilson specializes in Renaissance and Early Modern Art and her teaching explore the artistic and urban cultures of early modern Europe, with a focus on space, print, portraiture, landscape, and transcultural, material and environmental interactions.
Bio
Mary Felstiner

Visiting Professor of History (2007-2011)
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Professor Felstiner was Visiting Professor of History at Stanford and previously Professor of History at San Francisco State University and authored a biography of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon which won the National Jewish Book Award.

Quotes and‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ excerpts‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

Beham, Sebald. Impossible. 1549.

“People living in [Florence during the Italian Renaissance] understood works of art and architecture as things they lived with as part of the whole apparatus of their social and political lives—[and] encounter them in a very different way than we do.”

— Niall Atkinson

Friedrich, Caspar David. Bushes in the snow. 1827.

“The works demand that we become speculative viewers. Speculation is essentially taking the raw data of perception, what you see and experience in the visible world, simple or complex, and churning it over in your mind until you “see” the hidden principles that animate the world, whether that is the natural world or the social world of human interactions and institutions.”

— Mitchell Merback

“We still look at it even though we no longer have the same economy, the same politics, the same religious beliefs that gave rise to it... You don’t have to beam yourself back to the moment of its creation to fully appreciate it because it’s not exhausted by one purpose.”

— Andrei Pop

“Verbalizing a work of art is a great experience... You find your original perception changes, but that change belongs to the experience... There’s a ghost of the artist in the picture. ”

— Joseph Koerner